The name of Anton Rubinstein
is not so unfamiliar these days with
much of his music covered on CD. Marco
Polo produced his five piano concertos
and six symphonies as well as two volumes
of piano music played by Joseph Banowetz.
There’s his violin concerto, ballet
music from his operas The Demon,
Feramors, and Nero, and
a complete version of The Demon,
while Orbis musicae have produced Lieder
and duets for soprano and mezzo-soprano.
MDG themselves have begun a series,
the first of which (MDG 335 1165-2)
featured his cello concerto, Don
Quixote (also on Marco Polo) and
ballet music from The Demon.
There is, of course, plenty more music
to be explored among the 17 operas,
and he wrote a number of oratorios,
string quartets, a piano quintet (recorded
on the Abseits label), three violin
sonatas and two cello sonatas, in addition
to other chamber works including a fairly
popular viola sonata. As a leading virtuoso
of the piano he wrote a quantity of
music for the instrument, such as sonatas,
suites, serenades and other pieces,
with the Melody in F achieving wide
popularity. This second MDG CD features
the original four-movement version of
the Ocean symphony; three were
subsequently added (two in 1863, a third
in 1880) to form a giant seven-movement
symphony available on Marco Polo (8.220449).

Anton Grigorevich Rubinstein,
brother of the pianist and composer
Nikolai Rubinstein (founder director
of the Moscow Conservatory who cruelly
snubbed Tchaikovsky in his student years),
was a Russian
pianist, composer and conductor.
He was born in Vykhvatintsky on the
Moldovan border, learned the piano from
an early age, and made his first public
appearance at the age of nine. He was
taken to Paris, and in 1843, on Meyerbeer’s
and Mendelssohn’s recommendations, to
Berlin, where he studied theory with
Siegfried Dehn. He then moved to Vienna
for two years, where he briefly taught
piano before returning to Russia in
1848 to work as a musician for the sister-in-law
of the Tsar. He
began to tour again as a pianist in
the late 1850s, before settling in St
Petersburg where he founded the first
Conservatoire in Russia in 1862, his
educational concepts forming the basis
of state education in music. He also
continued to make tours as a pianist
and conductor of his own works (215
concerts in 239 days on a tour of the
USA in 1872), and spent a short stint
teaching in Dresden towards the end
of his life, dying in Peterhof at the
age of 65, having suffered from heart
disease for some time.

Not to be confused with the great 20th
century pianist Artur Rubinstein, Anton,
an even greater performer in his time
and a clear rival to Liszt and other
great pianists of the 19th century,
had a marked effect on the development
of music in Russia. The Conservatories
he and his brother established were
not welcomed by the nationalist composers,
who regarded them as a German intrusion,
and as it happens the Rubinsteins were
of German-Jewish extraction. As a composer
Rubinstein was prolific, up to Op.119
in his own catalogue, but his technical
facility told against him, so that by
the time of his death his work was not
properly valued by supporters of Russian
musical nationalism (who also accused
him of being subsumed by German influence).
Rubinstein’s music was quite widely
performed in his lifetime, but following
his death it was largely ignored. Now
there is something of a revival, and
this is to be welcomed, though with
the caveat that there’s a fair
amount of chaff to be found amongst
the wheat. Gustav Mahler said of him,
‘He is the thundering, but also very
elegant gentleman from Petersburg who
will tell you with grandeur and Slavic
straightforwardness what’s on his mind.
He comes straight to the point. A gentleman
from Russia with a overwhelming enthusiasm
for music. His opera, The Demon,
is a great elaborate piece of music
that belongs to the everlasting masterpieces
of this century.’

The Ouverture triomphale
of 1860, dedicated to Tsar Alexander
II, follows the Second Symphony in the
composer’s oeuvre, and has resonances
of the style of the later 1812 overture
by Tchaikovsky (1882) but laced with
more national anthems including the
Marseillaise and God Save
the Queen, presumably in its Austrian
origins. The latter is treated in a
rather contrapuntal way, and it all
ends in a triumphal militaristic apotheosis
in which the orchestra’s percussion
department (at least on this record)
appear to imitate dustmen making their
weekly call. The three orchestrated
piano pieces have a Russian charm of
their own to belie the accusation from
the Mighty Handful that Rubinstein was
nothing but a German stooge; their wistful
or merry melodies could be nothing but
Russian (albeit by Rubinstein’s contemporary
German orchestrator Karl Müller-Burghaus).
The Valse Caprice, more Johann
Strauss than Chopin, despite some galumphing
brass, also has more delicate wind writing.
The Trot de Cavalerie is a three-minute
Suppé-like Galop, a piece of
fun. So much for the half hour of introductory
curiosities before the heart of the
disc, namely the Ocean symphony.

This work comes just
at the beginning of what I tend to think
of as a black hole in the history of
the symphony, that quarter century between
Schumann and Brahms, 1850-1876. Not
that none was being written, just that
in general they have not endured other
than occasional performances and now
recordings on the fringes. Bruch’s first
two enjoyed a popularity according to
Kretschmar, and he also included Rubinstein’s
symphonies in his Führer durch
en Konzertsaal (Guide to the
Concert Hall). The Ocean
symphony enjoyed remarkable success,
with more than 200 performances documented
among the 15 most played during the
second half of the 19th century,
competing with those of Beethoven, Mendelssohn,
Schumann and Brahms. It is more a poetic
picture rather than a programmatic symphony,
though there are certainly musical clichés
depicting wind and waves here and there,
a scherzo which could have been inspired
by the song and dance of a jolly tar,
while the fact that it ended up as a
seven-movement work inevitably led to
the wrong conclusion that it became
a musical portrait of the seven seas.

George Hanson’s full-blooded
account with his Wuppertal Symphony
Orchestra is convincing and well-paced
despite some hard-driven tempi. The
sound in the city’s town hall provides
ambience and brightness, as well as
fine balance. While the Ocean
symphony might not secure a relaunch
as a result, nevertheless it’s a work
worth occasional revival.

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